LETTER: The Reds of Duhallow

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In the 2024 General Election, People Before Profit-Solidarity sought to give the electorate the choice of voting for a socialist candidate regardless of where they were living. As a result, we stood candidates in almost every constituency in the 26 counties. I had the honour of being selected to represent People Before Profit in the constituency of Cork North West. 

Cork North West is unique in two ways;

1. It is the most politically conservative constituency in the country. The last occasion a non-Fianna Fáil/Fine Gael TD was returned was in 1965.
2. It is geographically the biggest constituency in the country. It stretches from the western suburbs of Cork city, west to the Kerry border in the Muskerry Gaelteacht, north to Charleville on the Limerick border and westwards again through the Muskerry barony as far as Rathmore in Co. Kerry. 

Our election team took the decision to concentrate on canvassing the main towns in the area. The Duhallow towns proved to be the most interesting. The barony consists of three market towns, Kanturk, Newmarket and Millstreet. 

During the Newmarket canvas, I came across a portrait of John Philpot Curran in a shop window. Curran, an orator, politician and lawyer, defended many of the United Irishmen after the 1798 rebellion. His daughter, Sarah, was Robert Emmet’s fiancé. In a letter dated December 11^th 1869 to his comrade Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx had this to say about Curran, “you must get Curran’s speeches edited by Davies, for the period 1779-80 it is of decisive importance, not only because of Curran’s speeches (especially the legal ones, I consider Curran the only great advocate-people’s advocate-of the eighteenth century and the noblest nature, while Grattan was a parliamentary rogue) but because you will find quoted there all the sources for the United Irishmen.” Praise indeed. 

In Kanturk I made a more interesting discovery. While canvassing in the Bluepool Lower area of the town, I came across a plaque on a community hall with the inscription “Kanturk Trades Union 1881”.  I was quite surprised to find such a plaque in Kanturk. 

I researched class struggle in 19^th century Duhallow and uncovered what was, for me, a hidden history. From 1869 to 1882 a campaign by agricultural labourers for social and economic claims was most prominent in the Duhallow barony. This campaign was centred in Kanturk. The most prominent leader of this campaign was Philip Francis Johnson. 

Johnson and his family arrived in Kanturk in 1860. He was a republican and played a part in supporting Fenian prisoners. When in 1869 a meeting to organise rural labourers was held in the town, Johnson offered his support. The Kanturk Labourers’ Club was established. This was a decade before the founding of the Irish Land League. The Land League was the representative body for tenant farmers, the Labourers’ Club was organised by the lowest social layer in rural Ireland, the farm labourer, the spailpín. They had two key demands, a decent house for every labourer, with an attached acre at a fair rent.

As part of the campaign a mass rally of up to 2,000 was held in Kanturk in October 1869. This was phenomenal. A rally of 2,000 in Cork city today would be regarded as well attended. This was followed in 1871 by another mass rally in Millstreet, a smaller town, which attracted over 3,000 people. Johnson was not just a local activist; he reached out to the English based National Agricultural Labourers’ Union. The leader of the N.A.L.U. was a man called Joseph Arch. When in August 1873 a two-day conference was held in Kanturk, to establish the Irish Agricultural Labourers’ Union, Arch led a delegation of English farm labourers. 

Farm labourers were not supported by the Irish parliamentary party and the I.A.L.U. faded in the mid 1870s. When the Irish National Land League was founded in 1879, Johnson played a leading role in its establishment.

Johnson and the Irish Agricultural Labourers’ Union were opposed by the British establishment, landlords, the Catholic Church and Irish nationalists. As a result, they were labelled the “Reds of Duhallow.”  After the 2024 general election, Cork People Before Profit organised a public meeting in Kanturk. The meeting’s title “Reviving the Reds of Duhallow”.¹

Aluta Continua.

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1.  Thanks to labour historian Dr. Fintan Lane for his research into rural labourers in County Cork. His work is published in Irish Historical Studies, Vol.XXXIII No.130, November 2002, entitled “ P.F.Johnson ,nationalism, and Irish rural labourers, 1869-82.” ↩︎